CHAPTER SIX NURSE PATSY
CHAPTER
SIX
Nurse Patsy
It seemed like everybody was dropping out of Cora’s life, one after another.
First Lee, Benny, and Roscoe joined the war, then Loretta quit Sunshine State Insurance for a munitions factory job, then Jasper got drafted, and now Patsy was gone too.
In her letters, Patsy wrote about friends she was making and a mangy dog that kept coming around camp, but she didn’t talk about her work, and she never said a word about why she was still stateside.
Cora could read the disappointment in her letters, though, in the curt way she talked about her posting and the army.
For Patsy’s birthday, Cora had the bright idea to drive out to see her for the weekend. She was stationed right there in Florida, so Cora wanted to visit before the army shipped her off to wherever they’d been talking about needing all those nurses.
‘Here are your sandwiches for along the way,’ Momma said, handing Cora too much food.
‘I can’t eat all this,’ Cora said, rolling her eyes behind her mother’s back.
‘And there’s gas in the trunk.’
Cora opened the back of Benny’s sky-blue Plymouth and, sure enough, two gas canisters sat side by side.
‘Momma,’ Cora said with a sigh.
‘I just don’t want you to have to stop. You never know what you’re gonna run into out there.’
Cora hugged her momma and kissed her cheek. ‘Thanks for the gas and the sandwiches. Now, stop worrying. I’ll be fine.’
Her momma handed her The Negro Motorist Green Book. ‘That’s in case you do have to stop,’ she said.
The book had been Benny’s, but he’d never used it. Instead, he’d stopped wherever he wanted, knowing he wouldn’t be challenged, passing easily wherever he went.
Cora tossed the book onto the back seat with her bag and settled herself behind the wheel.
‘I’ll tell Patsy you said hi,’ she said, starting the engine.
Momma nodded and backed up from the car. As Cora pulled away, she saw the anxious set of her momma’s mouth in the rear-view mirror and the worried eyes that followed Cora until she turned the corner.
Civilians weren’t allowed to wander around Patsy’s camp, so they had arranged to meet in a nearby town.
Cora had hoped to take her somewhere nice, but there wasn’t a single sit-down restaurant that served Negros.
Just a run-down ribs joint that had a few benches outside to sit on. So that was what they did.
It was great to see Patsy again, but Cora could tell something was wrong. Her eagerness for nursing had practically vanished, and she hinted that she regretted joining the Nurse Corps.
‘Is it that bad?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.
Cora wondered how badly the soldiers could be wounded to make Patsy regret coming to help them. She imagined blown-off legs and burn-scarred faces. Silently she said another prayer for Lee, Benny, Roscoe and now Jasper.
After dinner, Cora and Patsy walked through town and passed a restaurant off limits to them.
It was the kind of place Cora had hoped to find for Patsy’s birthday dinner.
Cora took in the white tablecloths and white faces inside.
Then she gasped. One of the men sitting at a table leaned forward, and she saw the large white letters printed on his back.
PW. Prisoner of War. She grabbed Patsy’s arm.
‘Look.’ She pointed. She couldn’t tear her eyes away. There was a whole table of them with dark shirts and white letters on their backs, just sitting there. A waiter came to their table and served them plates of food.
‘Let’s go,’ Patsy said, tugging at Cora to come away.
She didn’t budge. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be in some kind of prison?’
Patsy scoffed, eyeing the men through the window.
‘They don’t get put in a prison like you think of a prison.
They get passes for good behavior, and with a pass, they can come and go pretty much where they please.
They just have to check back in at the end of the day and stay out of trouble.
They can go to the movies or the shops or restaurants, just like any other white man, as long as they have that pass. ’
Cora blinked slowly looking back at the men in the restaurant. A wobbly feeling ran up her legs, like the ground had suddenly buckled under her feet, and she felt the solid truth she thought she stood on crumble.
‘But,’ Cora said, shaking her head, ‘they’re the enemy.’
Next door to the restaurant, two more men with PW on their shirts came out of a general store, each clutching a packet of cigarettes. One had his arm in a sling. Both looked relaxed and at ease.
‘Ah, Nurse,’ the one with the sling said when he saw Patsy. He lifted his casted arm. ‘It itches. Tomorrow you must fix it.’ His thick accent sounded unmistakably German.
Patsy’s face set into a tight mask. Only the flare of her nostrils gave her away. ‘I don’t know if I’ll have time to help you tomorrow.’
Cora gaped at her.
The second prisoner of war stepped forward. ‘You,’ he pointed a finger at Patsy, ‘will find the time. You made it itch, so you will make it good.’
‘I’ll have to see if I—’
‘I will tell your major and he will tell you,’ the casted man said.
Patsy balled her hands into fists at her sides and turned, storming away, leaving Cora to scramble after her. ‘Patsy,’ she hissed, but Patsy just kept walking like the Devil himself was following.
‘Patsy, what was that? Why does he know you? What’s going on?’
Patsy pounded on until she got to a quiet street. Out of breath, and with rage tugging at her features, she glared at Cora like it was her fault. ‘I fixed his stupid arm.’
Cora stared, confused.
‘That’s what they have us doing down here. The war goes on and on and I’m stuck here patching up Nazis.’
Words dried in Cora’s mouth like dust. And then a prickling started in her palms and climbed up her spine.
‘They’re not even that hurt,’ Patsy said, eyes blazing.
‘They have to be well enough to be shipped all the way to America. And these people,’ she pointed back toward the PoWs and the restaurant, ‘who just finished shooting at our men, get to prance around here, going where they won’t even let us go.
’ Her rush of words explained the silences in her letters, the bitterness Cora had sensed between the lines.
Cora wrapped her arms around Patsy, but couldn’t say a thing to comfort her, because the truth was, this was all kinds of wrong.